August 2018

Other than a Skype meeting with European diplomats this morning, I’m in the office. However, since I’m leaving the country in 48 hours (going to Colombia) and still have a lot of writing to finish, I may not be easy to reach.

This is part three of a three-part WOLA series on the horror that the Trump administration and its “zero tolerance” policy unleashed at the U.S.-Mexico border this spring and summer—and what may come next. (Here is part one, on “zero tolerance” itself, and part two, on what happened at ports of entry.) All three are based on extensive documentary research and the fieldworkwedid in Arizona back in June.

Tiny excerpt from the new one:

Incredibly, the agencies holding the parents (ICE, Bureau of Prisons, or U.S. Marshals) have very little interface with the agency managing the children (ORR), and made little effort to track family members in each other’s custody. Still more incredibly, in nearly all cases, CBP kept no record of the link between the parents and children at the moment it separated them.

Parents being charged with “improper entry” were given no receipt, claim check, or any other document establishing their link to their children. No database maintained a record of the parent-child relationship. Parents, and the agencies holding the parents, were given no information about their children’s whereabouts, as ORR moved them to shelters and homes all around the country.

While Mr. Trump may try to change the name, the agreement reached with Mexico is simply a revised Nafta, with updates to provisions surrounding the digital economy, automobiles, agriculture and labor unions

I’m guest-teaching an “Andean Republics” class at the Foreign Service Institute this morning. Mid-day, I expect I’ll be helping launch a new report about the fallout from the “zero tolerance” policy at the border. Mid-afternoon I have a family medical errand (nothing serious), and will be writing about Colombia on my laptop someplace nearby.

One of the central questions in Colombian politics this year: how independent is the new president, Iván Duque—a 42-year-old technocrat with a light political resume—from his political party’s 500-watt boss, the incendiary far-right former president Álvaro Uribe?

The word “puppet” gets tossed around a lot. But Duque is in fact showing some genuine flashes of independence.

We saw a very bright one yesterday, when Duque showed up at the polls to vote in an anti-corruption referendum, the result of a citizen signature-gathering initiative, that Uribe bitterly opposed. In angry tweets, the ex-president attacked the anti-corruption measure’s promoters personally, accusing them of wasting US$100 million to hold yesterday’s vote. [No idea if that figure is accurate. In the end, the anti-corruption consultation didn’t reach the voter-participation threshold needed to make its measures law. This was expected—but few expected 11.6 million Colombians, 32 percent of all registered voters, to show up on a Sunday in August.]

In a piece titled “Anticorruption Consultation: the first Duque-Uribe Disagreement,” Semana magazine notes the contrast between President Duque and his “patron”:

The ex-president became, in the hours before, the initiative’s fiercest opponent. “I will not vote in the deceptive consultation, and I have cared for the state’s resources throughout my public career with transparency and austerity,” Uribe tweeted.

…Uribe’s lashing out contrasted with the words that his candidate, now the president, Iván Duque, had said earlier. From San Jacinto, Bolivar, the head of state assured that “it is a citizen’s duty, in the conscience of each, to go to the polls and vote on the questions with which he feels identified.”

Duque’s words stand out both for their vague, lawyerly/academic language, but especially for their distinctly un-Uribe-like quality. He spoke similarly at an August 23 event in the Urabá region of northwest Colombia—hardcore Uribe territory—to launch a new policy to protect threatened social leaders:

In his speech [reports El Nuevo Siglo], Duque said that “if we want to guarantee the life and integrity of our social leaders, we have to dismantle the structures of organized crime that are attacking them.”

“What we want is to seek an integral response of preventive actions and investigative speed to guarantee freedom of expression to all the people who are exercising the defense of human rights,” said the head of state [according to El Espectador].

Again, those are two sentences one could never imagine Álvaro Uribe uttering; the ex-president instead has a long record of calling his civil-society critics guerrilla supporters, terrorists, or even child molesters.

Duque’s sentences in defense of social leaders are good ones. Though a bit imprecise, their tone and content offer assurance that the “puppet” narrative may be overblown—and that the Duque government, though conservative and traditional, may not end up being a third Álvaro Uribe term after all.

ICE spokesman Matthew Bourke said immigration court attendance is strong for immigrants in intensive supervision, but that ankle monitors and other measures are “not an effective tool” after deportation orders are issued

I’ve got a morning staff meeting, and an open afternoon in the office. I’ll be working extra-late because I have to pick up my daughter tonight not far from the office. As the day progresses, I’ll be taking care of some small but time-sensitive items, editing a planning document for our work this fall, working on a Colombia peace process update and an article about U.S. policy toward Colombia, and preparing a talk I’ll be giving tomorrow morning to a class at the Foreign Service Institute.

The week before Labor Day is usually a slow one in Washington, but not for me. On Friday I’ll be flying to Colombia, joining two colleagues on a nine-day trip to do some field research (and write a report) and to have a series of meetings in Bogotá.

This week will be spent preparing for that, launching a third and final report based on our June visit to the U.S.-Mexico border (here’s part one and part two), and finishing an article about U.S. policy toward Colombia’s peace process during the Trump administration. Luckily, there aren’t too many commitments on my calendar today through Thursday.

“For many Argentines, then, the military represented not a subjugation to arbitrary rule, but a release from the frustrations, complexity, and compromises of representative government. A large part of society clasped with joy the extended hand of totalitarian certainty. Life was suddenly simplified by conformity to a single, uncontested power. For those who cherish democracy, it is necessary to comprehend the secret delight with which many greeted its passing. A quick fix to the insurgency seemed infinitely preferable to plodding investigations, piecemeal arrests, and case-by-case lawful trials. Whipped up by the irrational fear of a communist takeover, this impatience won the day. And once Argentina had accepted the necessity for a single, absolute solution, the killing could begin.”

The one that will go out at 9PM Eastern tonight, for instance, will include my most-recommended Latin America security news links from the past week, links to government reports, a link to last week’s Colombia news update (which is just too long to embed in an email), an overview of US aid to Colombia, my favorite songs of the week, and more.

Just add your name and e-mail here, and look for the confirmation e-mail in your inbox. I promise never to share your e-mail address with anyone.

The conclusions listed in the report point to serious challenges in building some, if not all, of the prototypes as they were erected in San Diego, because of structural issues in their design or with construction

Army Master Sgt. Daniel Gould, assigned to the 7th Special Forces Group, was arrested after Drug Enforcement Administration agents found 40 kilograms of cocaine in two backpacks on a military airplane in Colombia

Guatemala

The circle is nearly closed. Jimmy Morales, who won power precisely because of his predecessor’s corruption, is now facing down accusations that he committed some of the same transgressions. It was a biblical lesson he apparently missed

The Pérez Molina and Baldetti government clearly understood that in order to be in politics and make money in Guatemala, corrupt politicians and businessmen use what they call “quotas of power,” or favors, which open doors to contracts and government benefits

Powerful Guatemalan politicians and businessmen accused in the investigations have been repeatedly trying to undermine the CICIG and stop the investigations against them and their allies, including through recent overtures to Washington